Why Chinese officials like useless meetings in over-stuffed chairs

REVEALINGLY OFTEN, when foreigners meet Chinese leaders the encounter is a pain in the neck. The cause is not mysterious. For reasons that may involve both high culture and low political calculation, important visitors to China are typically invited to sink into one of a pair of side-by-side armchairs, at one end of a formal reception room. There the guest must sit, head twisted through 90 degrees, to see and hear a host whose opening remarks may stretch to an hour.

Foreign bigwigs planning to consult aides in such a meeting room are further out of luck. Their entourage will be trapped in their own armchairs, placed in a horseshoe pattern or marching down one long wall of the room, opposite a matching row of Chinese officials. In a recent episode of the US-China Dialogue Podcast, an oral history project at Georgetown University, Wendy Cutler, who as an American official played a leading role in negotiating China’s entry to the World Trade Organisation, recalls how her Chinese counterparts used exhaustion and embarrassment to manipulate visitors. For one thing, they have a habit of beginning meetings with envoys at 10pm. Then there is the hazard of reception rooms that make it daunting to stand up from an armchair, cross yards of empty carpet and hand a boss a note about a detail of policy or tactics. Visitors have to be very sure that their message for the boss is worth the interruption, because the room makes it “very awkward”, Ms Cutler recalls.